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Siri May Be Coming To Macs in OS X 10.9 According To Apple Job Listing

When Apple announced the preview of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion last year, we were hoping that it would also include Siri – Apple’s personal assistant feature. Unfortunately, all we got was the dictation feature.

But it looks like Apple is planning to finally bring Siri to Macs, as a new job listing has revealed that Apple is looking for a Siri UI engineer who will be in charge of implementing the contents that appears in Siri’s conversational view.

Apple is looking for someone who has “Familiarity with Unix, especially Mac OS X” and a “Passion for the Macintosh platform and writing simple, elegant software that is easy and fun to use.”

This is a broad-ranging task – we take every application that Siri interacts with, distill it down to fundamentals, and implement that application’s UI in a theme fitting with Siri. Consider it an entire miniature OS within the OS, and you get a good idea of the scope!

Of course, each of these little “snippets” corresponds to an individual application, so you will have extensive cross-functional work with many other teams. You’ll need to work with them to enable access to their data and behaviors, and wire them up to your implementations. As a result, strong API design is needed to keep communications ideal.

What’s more interesting from the job posting is that Apple sees Siri as a miniature OS within the OS. A job posting in January revealed that Apple wants to make Siri more lifelike and interesting. I think the bigger problem Apple has with Siri, is to get people to use it more often and one way to do that is open up Siri’s APIs so that third-party developers can integrate it in theirs apps.

It remains to be seen what kind of features Apple adds to Siri this year, but opening up APIs is on the top of my wish list, along with improved accuracy and reliability. What’s on your wish list for Siri?

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